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The story takes place in the year 2084, set in a futuristicParis known as "Neo-Paris," a sprawling, beautiful, vibrant metropolis, made rich and prosperous with the development of a revolutionary new technology known as the Sensation Engine. Developed by the Memorize Corporation, the "Sensen" — as it's widely called — is a brain implant that allows people to alter their memories, deleting them, sharing them via the wireless pervasive 'Net, trading them, or even buying new ones that are distributed by Memorize, which acts as a central hub to store these memories. This has allowed the corporation to turn Neo-Paris into their own private surveillance state of sorts, with the interconnectivity giving them a vast degree of control over the population.

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The hero of our story is Nilin, a "memory hunter" (a person specializing in targeting and stealing memories) in a resistance against Memorize, who was unique among her fellow hunters because of her ability to manipulate others' memories by diving into them and changing minute details to create an alternate reality for that person to remember, instead of the real one she had changed. Nilin was captured by the corporation and had most of her memories erased, before they imprisoned her in a super-max prison called "La Bastille." Here, she was contacted by a mysterious hacker called "Edge," a leader of a guerilla revolutionary movement known as "The Errorists," who sought to bring to light the corruption of Memorize and hopefully bring them down. With his help, Nilin escapes into the underground, and- after fighting off waves of mutants known as "Leapers" — once people who became so addicted to their Sensen it degraded and changed them — she makes it to the surface in the slums of Neo-Paris, where she officially rejoins Edge's cause.

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Nilin's goal, however, is to recover her lost memories and find out exactly what happened to her, hoping to clear herself of her status as a fugitive.

Tropes found in the game:

Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Paris is already a city famous for the network of tunnels, catacombs, and metro lines built up underneath it over the centuries. Add to that several large subterranean aqueducts built quickly as an emergency stopgap measure to contain the rising global water level, and you get plenty of these, often occupied by Leapers.

Adult Fear: When remixing Charles Cartier-Wells' memories, your objective is to change it to where he inadvertently kills his own daughter with a Memory Bug instead of purging her memories of a traumatic car accident.

Aerith and Bob: Compare Nilin and Edge with names like Gabriel, Frank and Alexia. This is actually intentional: to unfamiliar ears Nilin would sound like an exotic name that belongs in a cyberpunk dystopia, but it's an existing name of Hindi origin and thus really is something people would name their kid. Particularly certain people who are also of mixed, partially Indian origin. As for Edge, he isn't exactly human in the first place.

Airborne Mook: The AV-48S Seraphim security robots. These fly safely beyond the reach of your melee attacks and fire energy projectiles to disrupt your combos on other enemies. In some arenas they even fly between vantage points to keep you within their range. Luckily they're Glass Cannons and can be destroyed in just two Junk Bolt shots.

Ambiguous Robots: The Zorns are definitely robots, but two very unrobotic things characterize them. First, they're smart enough to taunt you in battle — they say some very demoralizing things. Secondly, they often unleash a terrifying howl, complete with a hologram of a screaming mouth (with the word "warning" on its side). These are both likely because the Zorn is designed to intimidate you into surrendering.

And This Is for...: Nilin gets an impressive one during her memory overload of Sergeant Vaughan.

Nilin: This is for everything you did to me! And that's for everything else I can't even remember!

Apathetic Citizens: The well-to-do citizens of Neo-Paris, and fully justified by Sensen technology. If something is bothering them, some pang at their conscience or worry, they can pay for the Easy Amnesia to just forget it, and this has been made so accessible that they can just ignore any concerns practically at will. Once much of the city becomes flooded, they find that a bit harder to just forget...

Edge: It's not their selfishness that I condemn, sister. It's their eagerness to forget everything that bothers them.

Arc Words: "So empty, so true" and "Remember you soon". The former is usually spoken by people suffering from mental corruption, like Leapers. So it becomes a really bad sign when uttered by Edge...

The Zorn's weak points are helpfully marked so Nilin's auto-targeting can lock on.

The final boss goes so far as to tell you exactly how to hurt it. Justified because he wants to die.

Augmented Reality: Ubiquitous thanks to the presence of Sensen. Virtually every store, kiosk, and even a few robots use AR displays. Even areas that have been abandoned for years — or flooded for decades — have AR tags scattered throughout.

Background Boss: The final boss is large (6-10 meters) and will attack by hitting you with its hands, creating projectiles and summoning other enemies. It is not possible to close the distance until the finishing cutscene.

The Beautiful Elite: While the lower-class toils away in the slums, the middle and upper-class enjoys a life of leisure and privilege on the gleaming streets of Neo-Paris. Their homes are gorgeous, they have all the latest technologies at their disposal, they have robotic servants that cater to their whims, etc.

Beehive Barrier: The robotic Seraphim and Nephilim enemies can generate these to foil Nilin's attacks.

Bilingual Bonus: There's a lot of French in the game, on signs and street graffiti. If you know the language it adds to the already vast world created by the atmosphere.

In spite of their name, Elite Enforcers are closer to this due to their electrified armour, which will literally damage Nilin with every strike of hers, demanding that she use Regen Pressen-heavy combos to counteract the harm. S-Pressens are also effective, but using those regularly depends on landing combos with Power and Cooldown Pressens. Have fun!

Mourner Leapers are this in-universe, as they are able to command other Leapers, turn invisible, camouflage as humans, and even teleport. However, Mourners are only encountered twice in the game, and always in a boss battle-like fashion.

Broken Aesop: We're told that memories, even painful ones, are a necessary part of life and the human experience, but all the problems in the story are caused by people who couldn't forget their painful memories and took that pain out on others; Nilin can make anyone believe almost anything, and she has no problem using the memory-remix ability to solve her problems with no consequences except the ones she inflicts on herself.

In addition, the moral of the story goes against our scientific understanding of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, where victims of traumatic experiences undergo beta-blocker treatment to essentially "forget" their trauma in an attempt to lead a normal life.

Bullfight Boss: Kid X-Mas is this during his first two phases, charging after you and occasionally using the Spammer in his second phase. By the time he gets to third phase, he stops doing that in favor of deploying mines around the arena.

Captain Ersatz: Despite the fact that it is supposed to reference Nineteen Eighty-Four (see below), the environment is actually much closer to Brave New World. Dr. Quaid is turning the mentally-deranged into slaves. Even further, Edge could be considered a reimagined copy of John the Savage.

Chekhov's Skill: During your first memory remix — which also serves as a tutorial for these events — you are likely to trigger a Memory Bug, with the game explaining why these are undesirable. You can trigger Memory Bugs in all remixes; though you can't succeed by doing so (most of the time) you get a trophy/achievement if you trigger all of them at least once. So the possibility of Memory Bugs seems to be merely for 100% Completion purposes... until you get to the final remix, where your objective is to trigger one.

Crapsack World: It's a cyberpunk game, so naturally the old order is crumbling, the poor are forced to live in slums and ruins while the rich swan about in newly-built malls and shops, and the definition of what it means to be human is constantly being toyed with. The world is still recovering from a European civil war that left the old Paris in ruins, and the journal entries you can find scattered throughout the world include references to a war between Russia and Canada. The main plot of the game involves turning prisoners into brainwashed, sub-human slaves through memory manipulation, thus creating a permanent, controllable underclass.

Cyber Punk: Pretty much everyone in the world uses Sensen, an augmented-reality device that also allows for the free exchange of actual memories. Overuse of that last feature tends to cause addiction, followed by a specific kind of insanity that gradually destroys the user's personality.

Cyberspace: The so-called Ego Rooms are locations that exist entirely in cyberspace. Your battles against Madame and the final boss take place in these.

Diegetic Interface: A mixed example; some of the interface elements are augmented reality features that it's implied Nilin can see in-universe, while others are only for the benefit of the player.

Divide by Zero: A Memory Bug occurs when Nilin causes a person to be killed in their own memory, creating a paradox where they remember they were killed but they can't possibly be alive to remember it. However, making the subject "remember" seeing someone close to them die is fair game. The final remix tasks you with triggering a Memory Bug.

Doppleganger Spin: Madame's boss fight involves her creating copies of herself in the second stage. Hitting the wrong one injures you. Hitting the right one stuns her to allow follow-up attacks. The right one is posed slightly different than the rest, though it can be hard to tell without knowing what to look for. The game encourages Nilin to use her S-Pressens to overcome the illusion instead.

Dream Within a Dream: When Nilin confronts her father the player gets to remix his memory, and then the memory of a childhood version of Nilinwithin the first memory.

Driven to Suicide: Using Nilin's Memory Remix ability on specific targets, she can alter their memories to push them into doing this, as witnessed in the demo where she convinces Frank he killed his wife.

Dual Boss: The only other time you encounter Mourner Leapers after Johnny Greenteeth is when two of them appear at once. It's got its own special theme, in case you weren't sure it's a major encounter.

Early Game Hell: A bit of a crossover with New Game+. The PMP, SAT Patches, Focus Boosts, and Sensen combos from one playthrough carry over into any future playthroughs in that save slot...which significantly reduces the difficulty of several sections on replay, even after increasing the game's difficulty setting.

Easy Amnesia: A core part of the setting, granted widely by Sensen technology. People can just forget bad memories and implant more pleasant ones at will through their implants.

Expository Gameplay Limitation: The game will sometimes slow Nilin down to a walk, usually during dialogue sequences. In some cases there are nearby obstacles that Nilin can target with her Spammer or climb over, which temporarily override the slowed movement.

Fake Memories: A major plot element, and actually a game mechanic as well.

When Nilin makes it onto the streets of Neo-Paris, she can encounter a street preacher talking about God manifesting Himself through the collective memories of humanity. The final boss, H3O, is an A.I. spontaneously born from the memories stored within the Conception Cube.

When Nilin first meets Johnny Greenteeth, his outfit looks like that of a doctor or another medical professional. Nilin later discovers that Johnny used to be a colleague of Dr. Quaid at La Bastille.

Edge often refers to Nilin as "sis" and she reciprocates at least once with "bro", since the Errorists tend to use familial terms to address each other. Given that H30 is also the "child" of the Cartier-Wells, it's also literal.

Final-Exam Boss: The final boss tests your understanding of most of Nilin's S-Pressens, your mastery of combos, and your knowledge of enemy strengths and weaknesses. About the only thing it doesn't cover is quick time events.

"Memory Overload", where Nilin knocks over a stunned enemy, palms their back of their neck, and directly accesses their Sensen implant to overload it with junk data such that they're rendered practically catatonic. Comes complete with a "gunshot" style particle effect spray in augmented reality.

Most bosses have to be finished off with a "Terminate" sequence — see Press X to Not Die. Nilin usually delivers the Overload on the final button prompt or in the cutscene immediately after.

Flunky Boss: Both the Madame and the final boss will summon digital versions of Enforcers and their security robots to assist them in the battle. This serves to allow you to build Focus, lower your cooldowns, and heal using Pressens, since the bosses occasionally require the use of Focus moves that you would almost certainly run out of otherwise.

Fun with Acronyms: While they're all employed by the Memorize corporation, the official name of Enforcers' group is SABRE.

Generic Graffiti: There are countless sprayed all over the place in Slum 404, like a pixel stencil graffiti of Mona Lisa.

Genre Blindness: Capt. Trace makes the mistake of toying with Nilin first by chasing her and deliberately shooting around, giving her the chance to escape and turn the tables on him.

Genre-Busting: A handy mix of combo-based brawling (and you can build your own combos), realistic platforming and the "memory remix" segments, with the occasional puzzle thrown in.

Giant Mook: The Skinner Leapers are much taller and bulkier than regular Prowler Leapers,and have correspondingly greater health. They have a similar moveset to Prowlers but receive significant buffs from the presence of other Leapers. That, and they will block all regular attacks, requiring either the use of power moves or the activation of Fury.

Grimy Water: The first time when Nilin comes near water is when she's in the sewers, and her Super Drowning Skills are explained by it being full of nuclear waste, pathogens and other pollutants. Naturally, it doesn't have any effect on her when she's walking alongside, or even through ankle-high pools of it, and there are no long-term consequences for her.

Hard Light: Some of Nilin's abilities seem to be this. Particularly the "Junk Bolt" that forms a holographic Arm Cannon to destroy physical objects.

HeelFace Brainwashing: Early on, Nilin uses her Memory Remixing abilities to turn bounty hunter Olga Sedova to her side by warping her memory into believing that her husband David was killed by Memorize thanks to a botched surgery. Arguably done to the Cartier-Wells as well, though both of them realize what's going on — if Scylla doesn't in Episode 5, she surely does by Episode 8 — and decide to change their ways anyway.

Heroic Sacrifice: H30's/Edge's ultimate motive-he has decided that the Sensen system is utterly irredeemable as a concept and has created a Crapsack World where people run from life. Thus, he wants Nilin to destroy him, and with it, return everyone's true memories.

He Was Right There All Along: Throughout episode 6, Nilin repeatedly catches a glimpse of something camouflaged moving past her. One of those moments happens when she's waiting at a security scanner in front of a door, and it opens with the message, "Welcome, Dr. Green." However, at a later door, the scan identifies her as Nilin. When Nilin finds Dr. Quaid, Johnny Greenteeth suddenly appears out of thin air. Nilin realizes later that Johnny used to be the Dr. Green in question. Now consider that Johnny was likely stalking Nilin since they first met in the subway so that she'd lead him to Quaid.

I Am the Noun: Done twice when Nilin finally gets to meet Edge. He calls himself Edge, then H3O, then the father of the Leapers. When Nilin enters her Ego Room, H3O calls itself by name, then "Sensen", then the Leapers.

Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Captain Gabriel Trace is a proud graduate. The odd thing is that when he's not toying with Nilin, he's a crack shot, able to aim the gunship's weapons with pinpoint precision the second she sticks her nose out. Another possibility is that the gunship's weapons are computer-aided, and he deliberately changed the settings to aim around Nilin when he's not being serious.

Inane Blabbering: One effect of the mental degeneration that turns ordinary people into Leapers is their speech patterns breaking down. Occasionally they manage to say something vaguely relevant to the situation, but then you have people like David Sedova whose ramblings are all so much word salad.

Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: In a game with frequent parkour/platformer sections, it's extremely frustrating that Nilin can't jump over knee-high objects unless the plot demands it. There are a handful of spots where you can seeRare Candy right on the other side of a knee-high box, but you have to find a level passage around. It doesn't help that Nilin has one of the lowest, most useless jumps in gaming history. Sawteeth are also used extensively to keep the game linear. Much of the Rare Candy is on forks off the main path, but proceeding down the main path locks the passage behind you. Many forks are 50/50 guesses whether you're going to find a powerup and backtrack or lose it forever.

Kick the Son of a Bitch: In order to establish that the Psychic-Assisted Suicide victim in the first demo deserves it, a throwaway line mentions how he punished a cop for not killing a homeless person that got in his way while pursuing a criminal. Not to mention that in his unaltered memory, he throws an empty beer bottle at his girlfriend (but drunkenly misses).

Kill the Ones You Love: Nilin does not want to destroy Edge, but he insists it must be done. Eventually, she agrees that it is necessary, but it's clear that doing so is painful for her.

King Mook: Johnny Greenteeth is definitely the King of the Leapers, for multiple reasons. He's got powerful holographic abilities that let him vanish or impersonate a normal human, and he's capable of surprisingly coherent conversations. His boss fight is annoyingly difficult, too.

Lack of Empathy: Edge seems to have a noble goal in destroying the Sensen network, but he cares little to nothing for the people he has to hurt to get that accomplished. This makes more sense when you learn that Edge isn't human, but an AI born of all the cast-off bad memories of humanity.

Lampshade Hanging: There's no obvious reason why having one's memories damaged by Sensen misuse, like the Leapers, should cause any sort of physical mutation. Which is exactly why the phenomenon is being studied by Dr. Quaid. And weaponized. Also when Nilin finds out that Mrs. Cartier-Wells is her mother, she is quick to point out the cliche nature of these revelations and wonders whether next she'll learn that Bad Request is her long-lost brother (he isn't; however, being an Errorist sympathizer, he does call Nilin "sister").

Layered Metropolis: Neo-Paris is divided into three sections. Lowest of these is the Underground, which is the rotted, decaying remains of old Paris, covered in moss and grime, and crawling with Leapers. Above that is the Slums, where the under-privileged live in poverty and destitution. And beyond that, separated by a reinforced wall, is Neo-Paris, a shining utopia of elegance, success, and beauty, where the middle and upper-class reside.

Lean and Mean: All the Leapers are abnormally thin and gaunt, giving them a ghoulish appearance to go with their aggressive behavior. Several of them seem to experience a strange post-pubescent long bone growth that gives them Creepy Long Fingers and Arms, making them look even taller and further from human.

Le Parkour: While less elegant than the Assassins, Nilin is no stranger to scaling walls and jumping from water pipe to abutment.

Life Drain: One of Nilin's Pressens is a strike that heals her. Chain them together and she recovers to full health just by punching and kicking people! This is actually required when fighting Elite Enforcers, who wear electrified armor that damages you every time you hurt them.

Magic A Is Magic A: Apart from one definite and one possible exception, the rules of the setting are rather consistent: Everything beyond the mundane happens because of the ubiquitous Sensen implants. You're not magically stunning people, you're overloading their implants with a Denial of Service attack. And you're not becoming invisible either, you're manipulating other people's vision. The exceptions are the Junk Bolt which can destroy unpowered physical objects and possibly the Mourner Leapers, assuming their teleportation abilities are real rather than a combination of illusions and ranged attacks.

Magic Tool: Nilin's glove, which also gives her access to Remembranes to aid her in her path.

Male Gaze: A lot of footage for the game and its cover art like to focus on Nilin's buttocks. According to initial interviews, advertisers were really not happy with the idea of a female protagonist who wasn't a Third-Person Seductress.

And even if she isn't sexualized, Nilin has still a... well-animated backside, especially when she walks.

Meaningful Name: The names of all security robots have meaning. The angel-like airborne robots are known as AV48S Seraphim, for a type of angel, while the ground-based robots are called AV48N - Nephilim, which is most commonly translated as fallen angel. The huge mecha guard at the entrance to the Bastille Prison is called AV78 Zorn, which is German word for "wrath". Fittingly, the move you use to hack them over to your side is known as Rust In Pieces. The locations also get in on the act: the Bastille used to be the most dreaded prison in France under the Bourbons and the French Revolution began with its capture and destruction. Its reconstruction and eventual destruction show that the social inequality of the era and the distance between the wealthy and the underclass has made a comeback. The Parisian slums that house said underclass are known as Slum 404, which signifies their invisibility to those in power.

Mind Rape: People who go to La Bastille have their memories of the world wiped away thinking there's nothing outside for them, giving them no reason to attempt to escape. It's only when their sentence is done that they get all of their memories back. Also anytime Nilin does an Overload on an Enforcer. Really, you could make the argument that this whole game is basically Mind Rape: The Video Game.

Mission Control is Off Its Meds: Nilin spends much of the game wondering whether this is the case after Edge gives her some very morally grey assignments. He really does have her and the world's best interests in mind, but his lack of empathy and his disdain for the privileged civilians whose lives they either end or ruin foreshadow that he is a little unstable — and also that he's a machine.

Mook Chivalry: Gleefully averted - enemies will always attempt to at least flank Nilin, if not get behind and completely surround her. Luckily, your Augmented Reality system will display red exclamation marks over their heads when they're about to strike. However, it's played straight in that only one of them will attack at any given time. If one enemy is about to attack, the others will wait a short while before they do anything other than move. Robots, however, have no problem attacking you at the same time as other robots or human enemies.

More Than Mind Control: By subtly manipulating a person's memories, Nilin can, for instance, drive them to suicide without ever technically suggesting it to them, or create a whole new reality where a mercenary she was fighting off somehow became her ally in her new memory.

Mutants: Of the sewer variety. The Leapers are citizens of Neo-Paris who have been affected by a mysterious sort of Sensen implant rejection, causing them to develop longer extremities, deformed facial features and various enhanced abilities. They have become addicted to other people's memories, and descended into insanity as a result.

Never Trust a Trailer: The original press releases implied that Nilin was a Memorize employee who was betrayed by them and recovered by Edge at the beginning of the story. In the game itself, Nilin has always been an Errorist and never worked for Memorize.

Not Even Bothering with the Accent: Oddly enough, to be set in Neo-Paris, not a single character in the game has a French accent. Unless, of course, you use the French audio track.

Not with the Safety on, You Won't: In a flashback to a previous remix, Alexia mocks Frank when he grabs his handgun because she knows he always leaves the safety on. She feels so confident about this that she even walks right up to him and grabs the barrel, pointing it at her own chest. Naturally, you can ensure the safety isn't on.

Painted-On Pants: When Nilin gets her own clothing back, the outfit includes blue jeans that look so tight they should almost prevent her from even moving her legs.

Perception Filter: Sensen Camo allows Nilin to become effectively invisible to her enemies by manipulating their Sensen implants. She will become visible again after attacking them once, but said attack can be a Memory Overload.

The execution; the gameplay is based on Neo-Paris having a zero-tolerance law against guns even for cops, but why don't the police use less-lethal weapons such as tasers, flash-bangs and tear gas? Hell, just capsaicin spray is debilitating with an impressively low risk of long-term side effects.

The social effects; Gun control laws actually increase the proliferation of illegal firearms; Japan has similarly draconian gun control laws, but it also has a thriving black market in guns - because a <$500 factory-made automatic nine-millimeter can be sold for the cost of a luxury car. To say nothing of the profit margin for bullets.

The exception; the crime that got Nilin imprisoned and wiped in the first place was a Psychic-Assisted Suicide - with a handgun.Frank Forlinwas a cop who had it on his desk at the moment, but he was permitted to keep the handgun with him at all times despite being a known alcoholic. In the memory Nilin remixes to make him commit suicide, he even keeps it loaded (albeit safetied) which results in him shooting his wife with it.

Power Copying: Over her journey, Nilin assimilates the special moves of other memory hackers into her own repertoire.

Hand Blast: The Spammer, a kind of handgun that is also used to unlock certain doors.

Hollywood Hacking: Aside from the standard long-range remixing and closer range memory overloads, the Pick-Socket allows her to open up doors and activate technology instantaneously. She is also capable of hacking the security robots to her side with the Rust In Pieces ability.

Tractor Beam: The Force Spammer, which allows her to move doors or other objects in the environment.

Press X to Not Die: Most boss fights end this way, which is irritating as the player is given very little warning. Each requires 3-4 inputs, and failing one means the boss recovers some health and gets to keep fighting.

Protagonist-Centered Morality: Nothing matters unless it matters to Nilin personally. None of the moral implications of her memory remixes are addressed except for the one she felt guilty about, and the only reason it mattered was Nilin's guilt over it, not the damage she caused or how wrong it was. She questions her actions and nameless NPCs seem to object, but she always avoids actually being culpable. At the end of the game, her relationship with her parents, and her parents' relationship with each other, are healed consequence-free because Nilin has remixed their memories to make it so. Although Nilin mentions having to fix the world, she also acknowledges that she now has godlike powers, and her behavior over the course of the entire plot suggests that her new perfectly loving family isn't going to take any heat she doesn't want them to.

Psychic-Assisted Suicide: The crime that got Nilin imprisoned and mindwiped; a SABRE Force officer who she remixed to believe he shot his wife while drunk.

Purple Prose: The dialogue presumably sounded a lot less silly in French. Ironically, Nilin notes that Edge talks like a poet, but she's not much better.

Rare Candy: The SAT Patches, Focus Boosts and Scaramechs, which are hidden away in most episodes. They increase your maximum health, maximum focus, and give a healthy experience boost, respectively.

Reliably Unreliable Guns: One of the Memory Bugs in Frank's memory remix scene involves him tossing his pistol with the safety off onto a table, whereupon it goes off and shoots him dead.

Regenerating Health: Subverted. In combat, Nilin recovers by landing combo hits with Regen Pressens assigned to them. Out of combat, Nilin can find the occasional SAT Station to instantly heal up.

RPG Elements: The game has the several hotkey-activated special abilities for you to use in addition to regular melee attacks, as well as the experience point collection and levelling up.

Shield-Bearing Mook: The second half of the game sees the appearance of "Heavy" versions of the various ranks of Enforcers. Their riot shields block all melee attacks, and if there's more than one they can group together and charge Nilin to deal some serious harm. Nilin can destroy the shields with the Junk Bolt or by targeting a nearby enemy with a Logic Bomb.

Shockwave Stomp: The Zorn has two ways of doing this. One is an actual stomp on the ground which stuns Nilin for a few seconds. The other happens after you disable both its arms, where it charges up a glowing ball of energy that explodes into a shockwave. Both of these require Nilin to time a dodge maneuver.

Super Mode: Fury, which can be activated when the Charge gauge is full and allows Nilin to inflict much more damage and break through the defences of some enemies. While it's active, every attack is accompanied by lots of AR "shattered glass" visual effects.

Super Powered Mook: The Strangler Leapers, who are capable of making themselves invisible, thanks to their glitching implants granting them an innate Invisibility Cloak. It is not perfect, however, and will stop functioning in light.

Space Whale Aesop: One message seems to be "don't overuse social media or you'll become a zombie". (Though, used metaphorically, that isn't really a Space Whale Aesop at all.) The main message of the game, though, is "don't run away from your problems or try to block out your past", which is much more applicable to real life.

Suspiciously Cracked Wall: Here, the walls, locks and other things like this are highlighted with a Structural Weakness notification in your augmented reality as a sign that they can be destroyed/broken through with the Junk Bolt.

Teleport Spam: The Mourners love to do this, alongside the more common invisibility. It's never explained how they do it, given all the difficulties with teleporting in Real Life. One would think that if they figured it out, Memorize and other companies would be investing billions into trying to do the same.

That Makes Me Feel Angry: Nilin's pre-mission monologues fall into this a lot. Granted, they are meant to be her internal monologues, but they're still hardly subtle.

The City Narrows: Slum 404, also called "Deep Paris" is the lower level of Neo-Paris, inhabitated by the Leapers.

Right after you get the Junk Bolt from Headache Tommy, you have 45 seconds to collapse the tunnels where the Leapers are swarming from. Luckily, there are only three targets and they're close together, so the time limit is the least of your worries.

After meeting Johnny Greenteeth in the subway, you have to disable two door controls to hold him back. Wait too long and he breaks in and grabs Nilin for an instant loss.

Token Romance: Averted thanks to Executive Meddling. As to whether this is a good thing, it does make the game less cliche, but unfortunately, it was done for fear that the (presumably straight male) gamer wouldn't want to (have his character) "kiss a dude".

Transferable Memory: The Sensen brain implant technology allows people to transfer memories between each other. In one of Nilin's memory remixes, a bounty hunter is trying to cure her husband by transferring her memories to him while he is in the hospital.

Translation Convention: Despite the game being set in future-France, most people speak American-accented English. Nilin herself speaks with an English accent, which, along with her initially ambiguous ethnicity, help make her seem more exotic and unique.

Was Once a Man: The Leapers are all pretty much this. Mourners, the rarest and most powerful of them, are even capable of camouflaging themselves as human and seem to prefer this state to their real appearance.

Waif-Fu: Nilin throws heavily armored guys twice her weight about like nobody's business. However, when she hits people, they often complain about their vision cutting out or their Sensen (personal augmented reality devices) glitching, or needing to reboot their implants. Nilin is certainly throwing punches and kicks, some of which clearly cause injuries, but the majority of the damage she inflicts is explicitly coming from messing with her opponents' personal software and with their heads. Backed up by the fact that Nilin won't even try to punch robots, even flimsy ones. Her finishing move, Memory Overload, is essentially a denial-of-service attack against the human brain.

Wall Crawl: Basic Prowler Leapers will often try to flank you by clinging to walls several metres above your head and jumping off somewhere behind you.

Weakened by the Light: The Strangler Leapers are capable of assuming invisibility in low-lit surroundings, but this ability cannot cope with intense artificial light. Thus, when most fights against these Leapers occur near some sort of a floodlight that you can temporarily enable to let you see them.

Well-Intentioned Extremist: Charles Cartier-Wells. He first used his Sensen technology to remove the most traumatic of memories so people will live a happier, unburdened life. He eventually became obsessed over happiness itself and propelled his research to remove ALL bad memories, no matter how minor, which led to the current state of Neo-Paris in the game.

What the Hell, Hero?: The final boss calls her out on remixing her mother's memory to get what Nilin wanted.

Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Gabriel Trace is the only person in the entire game that just opens up on Nilin with his gunship's weapons, and he makes the mistake of toying with her first.

Nilin: I can feel the power that scares them so. The power to take what someone is, to rewrite their history. To play God.

When put into context within the game itself, however, Nilin sounds more apprehensive about having such power.

Unexpected Gameplay Change: Some levels have the gun-equipped drones patrolling the entrances. If you get detected, these will gun you down in seconds, forcing you to always sneak past them. Makes one wonder why they aren't more common.

You Wouldn't Shoot Me: In one of the memory remixes, the player must arrange it so that Frank kills Alexia, prompting him to shoot himself in his guilt. In the remixed memory, Frank stumbles when he goes for his gun, and Alexia scoffs at him, saying, "What are you going to do? Shoot me?" while adding that he has never turned the safety off... and if the safety has been turned off in the remix, Alexia gets shot in the struggle to get the gun out of Frank's hands.

Your Mind Makes It Real: With a little help from the Sensen implant everyone has that is linked directly to their brain. Spoofing, overloading or otherwise hacking the implant has all kinds of interesting effects ranging from memory manipulations to unconsciousness or even degeneration into a Leaper.

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